| TO LIVE AND DIE SOUTH OF THE BORDER |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Thursday, November 21 2002 |
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| For weeks people walked around the Washington D.C. area not knowing if they were going to make it home alive. They went about their day afraid that a deranged sniper was going to cut their lives short with a single shot. For years now, young women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico have lived with a similar uncertainty. Every day they wonder if they will make it home safely, or become another victim of some depraved person or persons with a disregard for human life.
I wish local, state and federal authorities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border were as diligent in Ciudad Juarez as U.S. authorities were in the Washington area sniper cases. After 7 deaths, at least one thousand law enforcement officials were combing every corner of the scene where a murder had occurred searching for clues. The FBI was keeping a close eye, even the military sent out its surveillance planes to look for the bad guys.
In Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas, more than 320 women have been killed in the past 9 years. Of those, about 100 were raped and tortured, their bodies mutilated and dumped in the desert. Most were young, attractive women, slender with dark hair from poor families. Many worked in American factories known as maquiladoras..
There have been some arrests throughout the years, but dead bodies of young women continue to surface. And the killings continue to go unsolved. Two men who were charged with the latest series of murders claim to have been tortured into confessing. The DNA taken from the families in most of those cases does not match that of the bodies of the victims that were handed over for burial.
What shocks me more than the apparent incompetence of the local authorities is the disrespect for life. The field where the bodies of eight young women were found about a year ago is now being used as a garbage dump by the city's Department of Parks and Gardens. A group of business owners on a main highway are working to have a memorial to dozens of the victims removed arguing that it's "a horrible image in terms of tourism".
Could it be that the value of human life decreases once you cross the southern border? I sometimes wonder what would happen if these murders were taking place in the United States or some other country of interest to the U.S. Why can we go to war with Iraq in the name of protecting those poor Kuwaitis as we did in 1991, or invade Afghanistan to eliminate the Taliban who oppress their women, but look the other way while young women are being murdered just across our border.
Minor efforts by the Mexican federal police and the FBI to aid in the investigation have yet to produce results. You would think that knowing that there are 25 American women presumed missing in Juarez would arouse enough curiosity to see if any of them might be among the dead. Activist, including mothers of some of the victims have taken their plight to Washington but have not garnered enough interest to call attention.
There are so many theories being looked at and so many implications in these murders that my colleague Teresa Rodriguez who has been investigating the Juarez murders for four years, says in her upcoming book "The Death Trail", that the person or persons behind the killings must be very powerful to allow for such impunity. Rodriguez does not rule out the possibility that the perpetrators are actually on the other side of the border, in El Paso or somewhere in Texas.
In the Washington D.C. area, two men are facing charges for the sniper shootings. Residents no longer face the cruel fear that someone might open fire on them as they walk down the streets. But in Ciudad Juarez, young women still live with the fear that when they say goodbye to their parents as they leave for work in the morning, it might be their last goodbye. And if it is, will anyone care. |
